Wild Case Files: Montauk Monster
NGC 全民英檢：大自然神祕檔案－蒙托克怪獸
播出時間:9 月 3 日 星期六 @11:00-12:00
This time on Wild Case Files.
An unidentified creature
washes up on the shores of Long Island.
Something like I’ve never seen before.
It had like a beak.
Could it be an escapee
from a secretive government facility?
And is someone trying to conceal the truth?
Agencies seized the carcass,
the carcass is missing.
In Sweden a woman’s mutilated body is found
and her husband is arrested
on suspicion of murder.
This is the only case around the world
that we know of.//Did he really
murder his wife. Or is there a killer beast
lurking deep in the heart
of the Swedish woodland?
In Africa scientists race to find out
why hundreds of lions are fighting
to the death. And suffering from
strange seizures.
His brain tissue had been destroyed.
It was a total mystery.
Will they discover what’s happening
before lions vanish from the Serengeti forever?
Find out the answers to the natural world’s
strangest mysteries on Wild Case Files.
July 2008, Long Island, New York State.
It seems like an ordinary summer’s day
in the small holiday town of Montauk,
Long Island.
A group of friends take a walk
along the shore.
Little do they know
they are about to make a gruesome discovery.
We were looking for a spot to sit,
we saw a bunch of people huddled around.
We didn’t even know what they were
huddled around, so we walked over to see
what it was and we saw this dead animal.
What is this?//What is that?
Wow. Gross.
My friend Rachel had a camera, I said Rachel,
let’s take a picture of this thing,
it looks crazy.
It was about the size of a small dog.
It was hairless but it had patches of hair
and then it had like a long like dog tail
and then the head of it which was
where it was really weird
and what astonished everyone
was like it had like a beak.
It looked like a bird’s beak
or like a pterodactyl’s beak, you know,
like some kind of like reptile,
bird-type thing.
The other funny thing was the fingers.
They were like long fingers
and they were just strange looking.
And then it had like a tether around its arm,
so it looked like it was tagged
or had like a little like collar
or something on its arm.
The snap shots taken on the beach that day
inspire people around the world
to try and identify a creature
that has become known as the Montauk Monster.
Two weeks later local journalist Kitty Merrill
breaks the story.
It was disgusting, it was really gross
and, you know, people in the media
do tend to have a dark sense of humor
from time to time. We blew it up,
we shrunk it down, we didn’t put
the boss’s head on it
but it was close to that
so we messed around that for quite some time
before we actually started to
work on anything, but when we first
wrote it up we did it in kind of
a humorous manner and we really
didn’t draw any conclusions
or come to any kind of conclusion
other than, euww look what we...
somebody found on the beach.
The Montauk Monster becomes the talk
of the town and everyone has a theory
about what it is.
It sort of looked like a cross
between a dog and a turtle, I think,
so that was what made people
so sure that it was a monster.
It looks like a dog,
it looks like a dog
but with the face of a monster.
It reminded me of a turtle, a sea turtle,
large sea turtle that came out of its shell.
I thought it was a pig, but,
that’s all I know.
They were saying it was some kind of alien
or something but they couldn’t identify it.
Some people said it was a horse,
some people said it was a fish.
It was disgusting, actually.
The images are soon posted
all over the internet
and one Long Island blogger
becomes hooked by the monster mania.
My name is Nicky Papers, I am a web developer
and blogger and I took an interest
in the Montauk monster when the story broke
and since then I’ve been covering
all the new happenings on my blog.
When I first set up the site,
it was significant traffic
right out of the gate.
The story is followed on-line
by millions of people across the world.
I’ve had more people from Europe and the UK
contact me than any other country.
Some Asia, Thailand, Japan.
In Japan it’s very popular,
the Montauk Monster’s very popular in Japan.
But it’s in a research lab
in Portsmouth, England,
that zoologist Dr Darren Naish
scrutinizes the image for clues
as to the monster’s true identity.
People began emailing me, saying
have you see this weird carcass.
Just a few weeks beforehand
I’d been writing about sea monster carcasses,
alleged sea monster carcasses
and this seemed entirely in keeping with that.
Here’s this mystery carcass, what is it?
The beak-like head leads many to believe
the Montauk monster is a sea turtle.
Four species are found around the coast
of Long Island and they wash ashore regularly.
I was a believer that it was,
at one point in time, a turtle without a shell.
Well that’s just not possible.
The shell of a turtle isn’t just some structure
that sits on the back,
it’s a fundamental part of the body.
It’s actually the turtle’s ribcage.
In fact turtles are completely unique
among animals, they’ve actually
taken the bones of the shoulder girdle
and hip girdle and they have them
inside the ribcage.
So if you are missing the shell on a turtle,
then basically you’re missing the whole
of the body and if you’re looking at
the inside of the body you’d only be able
to see the vertebrae and the organs
and that clearly wasn’t the case.
There’s no way this is a turtle.
So what could the creature be?
Some new eyewitnesses come forward.
I’m Christina Pampalone
and I took this photo of the Montauk monster.
What I did initially see and in the photo,
as you can see, it had huge canine-like teeth.
That’s where the mystery kind of grew for me
because I would have said yeah,
maybe it’s some type of rodent
but its teeth were very big
and it almost looks like a gargoyle.
But some still doubt the creature is real.
Rumors circulate that the Montauk monster
is a hoax.//The photographs
we submitted were primarily to verify that
it actually existed. People were speculating
that something was photoshopped
or it was doctored but we just wanted
to corroborate the initial reports that,
yeah this was really found
and it was really disgusting.
So where could it have come from?
A government research centre
doing top secret work,
located just three kilometers off the coast
of Long Island, becomes a likely candidate.
There’s long been theories that Plum Island
has a real shady scientific experiments,
bio-experiments, testing on animals,
so since it’s so mysterious
and not much information exists about
what goes on there, immediately
there was speculation that it was,
this was a castaway from Plum Island.
What I know about Plum Island is that
it was featured in a scene
in Silence of the Lambs. That was
where they promised to take Hannibal Lecter
if he would help them catch the killer.
They subsequently issued a press release
along the lines of, it’s not ours,
you know, we didn’t do anything,
it has nothing to do with us.
Despite the denial, the strange looking tag
on the creature’s front limb
fuels rumors that this is some mutant
from the laboratory.
Everyone is gonna point the finger
toward a known place
where they may be cross-breeding animals,
maybe an animal has escaped
or there was a breach in security.
But the Montauk monster isn’t the only
freakish creature to be discovered.
Several thousand kilometers south, in Panama,
there are reports of another mysterious carcass.
The creature has a pink, bloated body
and long, gangly arms with hooks on the end.
Its short stubby face resembles ET.
And just like the Montauk monster,
its body is hairless.
So the story is that this peculiar creature
apparently stumbled out of a cave
and encountered some children
and they threw stones at it and killed it.
Now we don’t know whether that story’s true
or not but it probably isn’t.
It’s most likely that they did just find
this decomposing carcass.
And what commonly happens in mammal carcasses
when they’ve been decomposing in water
for a while, for a few weeks,
is they do lose their hair.
You end up with a bloated, naked,
extremely ugly carcass. We can still see
patches of shaggy, dark brown, grayish fur,
so originally this animal
would have been covered in that kind of fur.
Its long arms are really distinctive
because they’ve got enormous curved,
hook-like claws. It also has
this peculiar short, almost human-like face.
It’s got a very fat, rounded belly
and a rather tapering, narrow chest region
and again this combination of features
allows you to identify this animal
straight away. No doubt about it,
this is a sloth.//So the mysterious creature
in Panama turns out to just be a sloth.
It proves that decomposing animals
can look truly extra-terrestrial.
Back on Long Island Nicky Papers
gets an e-mail from a couple
claiming to have discovered
another strange carcass on a remote beach.
This time he wants to see it for himself.
When Nicky arrives at the beach,
he is disgusted by what he sees.
What I saw was something like
I’ve never seen before. It smelt horrific,
it was gray, bloated, leathery
and possessed all the characteristics
of a creature that I’ve never seen before.
And two months later, beach supervisor
Jan Wennstrom discovers a third carcass,
just a few kilometers from where the original
monster washed up.
To me it looked very, very similar
to the pictures of the first monster
that I had seen and the head was again,
exactly the same but smaller.
It was a very strange creature,
I mean the way it was formed with the head
like an eagle’s beak, teeth coming out.
So it was something that I’ve never seen.
I couldn’t even imagine
what kind of animal it would be.
So at the end I guess it is a monster.
All the Long Island carcasses
share common features-
the long, human-like fingers
and the shape of the snout.
The creatures are at different stages
of decomposition but Darren Naish
believes they are all from the same species.
Naish believes he can solve the mystery
from the photographic evidence
and eye-witness accounts.
So let’s review the evidence.
It had like a tether around its arm,
so it looks like it was tagged
or had like a little like collar
or something on its arm.
A strap or a belt of some kind
appears to be present on the right front limb
of the animal but if you look closely
you can clearly see gray hair coming off it
so it’s not a strap at all,
it’s just a patch of skin that’s bearing
the animal’s original fur.
Prior to reaching this stage of decomposition,
the animal would have been covered in fur
like this, gray, shaggy fur of some kind.
The head like an eagle’s beak,
teeth coming out.
It looked like a bird’s beak
or like a pterodactyl’s beak, you know,
like some kind of like reptile, bird-type thing.
Well one thing that happens fairly early on
in decomposing mammals is that much of
the soft tissue on the face rots away,
partly because there’s high amounts of bacteria
living in the nasal cavity and the mouth
and you always lose the soft tissue
around the nose. If you look closely at even
the very first Montauk monster photograph,
you can see quite clearly that
teeth are present. What we’re looking at
is the de-fleshed lower jaw and snout.
We’re seeing naked bone
whereas the soft tissue elsewhere on the body
is still intact.
It possessed all the characteristics
of a creature that I’ve never seen before
and scientists have yet to explain.
These teeth show clearly this isn’t
a mystery animal, this is clearly
some kind of mammal and the fact that
we can see particularly large canine teeth
shows us that it is, this is a carnivore
and a member of the same group of mammals
as cats, dogs, bears, weasels, raccoons.
So, based on its size, based on the fact
that it’s a carnivorous mammal,
there are really only two kinds of contenders.
A domestic dog or a raccoon.
The other funny thing with the finger
is they were like long fingers
and they were just strange looking.
The digits on the forelimbs
of the Montauk monster carcass
are really long, slim and almost finger-like.
They resemble human fingers superficially
and again that’s not characteristic of dogs,
dogs have fairly short digits on their paws.
It almost looks like a gargoyle.
We couldn’t make out what it was,
we couldn’t figure out what it was,
it just so disgusting and it was so, you know,
horrific, that we had to look at it more.
At the end I guess it is a monster.
It’s not some unexplained monster,
it is a relatively mundane, familiar animal
that’s really quite common
on the eastern coast of the USA.
It is a decomposing raccoon.
The quest to identify the Montauk Monster
is over.
Proof that sometimes the most ordinary creatures
can appear truly extra-ordinary.
Case closed.
September 2008, Loftahammar, Sweden.
The mutilated body of a 63 year old woman
is discovered on the shores of a lake.
This case will soon become one of Europe’s
wildest murder mysteries.
Officer Johan Bruun is leading
the forensics team in the hunt for the killer.
Her husband, Ingemar Westlund,
is immediately arrested
on suspicion of her murder.
Is Agnes’ husband really guilty of her murder
or is there another, wilder, force to blame?
As far as the forensics team can ascertain,
Agnes Westlund left home at 6 pm
to take her pet dog Yocke for a walk.
Three to four hours later
she was found dead by the banks
of the woodland lake.
But how can Ingemar have caused
these horrific injuries?
The first thought is he must have used
some kind of blade.
With no witnesses and no alibi,
Ingemar Westlund is arrested
on suspicion of murder.
There’s one kilometer track
between the house and the crime scene
and Ingemar could easily have driven
the lawnmower along it.
The police search for tracks,
but emergency vehicles and personnel
using the trail that night
destroyed that potential evidence.
The cut grass seemed to clinch the case,
but the police are unable to link
Ingemar’s lawnmower to his wife’s body.
With no evidence against him,
Ingemar Westlund is released
but he remains the prime suspect.
So what did happen on that tragic night?
If Agnes wasn’t murdered with the lawnmower,
how was she killed?
To find out, the forensics team
look back through the evidence
they collected at the crime scene,
and test some animal hairs
they found on Agnes’ clothes.
But the police can’t be sure
so they ask Goran Eriksson,
who is a Swedish wildlife expert.
The dog was only 6 months old at the time
and couldn’t have killed Agnes,
so to find out who or what the hairs belong to,
they are sent to the lab for analysis.
Sweden is home to some wild animals
that are obvious suspects
in this kind of attack.
Wolves and bears have a worldwide reputation
for being killers.
But the wolf population in Sweden
is carefully managed
and there are only about 210 wolves
in the whole country.
If a wolf had attacked Agnes,
there would have been tell-tale teeth marks.
There are thousands of bears
and they are capable of cutting
and tearing flesh but the injuries
are not consistent with a bear attack either.
Among other suspects are wild pigs.
They are known to have killed people
in the past
and can be incredibly aggressive.
When the hair comes back from analysis
the results take everyone by surprise.
There are a number of deer species in Sweden
and to find out which one may have been
in contact with Agnes’ body
the police turn back to Goran.
Goran confirms that deer do attack people,
usually in Self defense.
And a fully grown animal
can inflict a lot of damage.
With the list of suspects narrowed down,
the police are on the verge of a breakthrough.
But suddenly they hit a complication.
It’s a set-back, an officer contaminated
the crime-scene with hairs from a red-deer.
But Goran is sure they’re still
on the right track.
So the contamination shouldn’t impede
the investigation and the hair
found inside Agnes’s clothing
needs to be re-analyzed.
European Elk or moose as they are known
in North America are the largest member
of the deer family.
They are herbivores and don’t eat meat,
yet a fully grown male can weigh
as much as 800 kilograms
and reach a height of over 2 meters
and incredibly, his antlers
can also grow to almost 2 meters wide.
Shy or not, an elk is now placed
at the scene of the crime.
Ingemar finds this difficult to comprehend.
Despite Ingemar’s contempt for the theory
reports from towns across Sweden
show that elk can act in strange
and menacing ways.
One elk even broke into a shoe store
and ran riot while half the town
looked on in disbelief.
What is causing this bizarre
and unnatural behavior?
A local warden thinks it has something to do
with their diet.
Elk come into villages to feast on piles
of fermenting apples. The thinking is that
this gets them drunk
and they become aggressive.
Could a drunken elk
have killed Agnes Westlund?
An 800 kilograms animal on a drunken rampage
is a terrifying thought.
So if the elk in question wasn’t drunk,
why else would it turn nasty?
A clue lies in the seasons.
In September, when Agnes was killed
elks are preparing for the rut
when males compete with each other
for the right to mate.
Nevertheless Goran is not convinced that
an elk in rut would attack Agnes.
With the investigation going nowhere,
the forensics team give Goran
unrestricted access to all of the evidence.
Can he prove that an elk killed Agnes
and clear her husband of her murder?
On close inspection of the pictures
of Agnes’s injuries Goran and his team
spot signs that it probably was an elk
that attacked her.
But if Goran is to clear Ingemar of murder
he needs to find conclusive evidence-
and he knows exactly where to look.
When mammals get angry
adrenalin levels are increased.
That increases the respiratory rate
and more saliva is produced
to keep the airways moist.
Tests confirm there are massive amounts
of elk saliva on her clothing.
More than a year after Agnes died,
the police can finally piece together
the chain of events that led to her death.
At 6 o’clock Agnes waves goodbye
to her husband Ingemar as he mows the lawn.
Little do they know it is to be the last time
they will ever see each other.
Walking into the wind,
Agnes and her young dog Yocke
startle an elk
that hasn’t sensed them approaching.
Yocke is terrified and barks
at the massive animal.
Preparing for the rut,
the elk is unusually aggressive.
The elk turns angrily and mock challenges Agnes,
who picks up the dog to protect him.
Agnes steps back, trips over
and events turn from bad
to worse.
What he actually finds
is much, much worse than he ever imagined.
Agnes’ injuries show that the moose
was extremely aggressive
and against an animal weighing nearly a ton,
she didn’t stand a chance.
Case closed.
The Serengeti National Park,
a treasure trove of wildlife
in the heart of East Africa.
It’s a safe haven for some of
the animal kingdom’s most majestic species
including more than 3000 lions,
the King of The Beasts.
But in 1994 hundreds of lions are dying
and there are fears they could be wiped out
from the Serengeti Plains forever.
American veterinarian Melody Roelke-Parker
is on the case to try to solve this mystery.
The main purpose of my going to the Serengeti
was to find out what disease problems
wildlife in Tanzania were experiencing.
Suddenly, almost on a weekly basis,
I was being presented with lions
who had been killed by other lions.
This is completely unprecedented.
These were not the classic takeovers
of a new male coming in
and killing off the youngsters.
These were adult animals that were being killed.
Think crushed skulls, damaged livers and spleens,
it was a total mystery and we honestly
did not know what was going on.
If the killings continue,
the biggest population of lions in the world
could be destroyed.
Dr Craig Packer joins Melody
in the hunt for clues.
He has studied the Serengeti lions
for over twenty years.
Nobody knows them better than him.
Lions are highly territorial.
The females defend a territory
against other females, males defend prides
against other males. They’re always
on the lookout for strangers
in their territory and they’ll chase them away.
There was kind of an odd thing
to find so many dead lions
when the sub-adults would ordinarily
just run away and be chased
and not stand their ground until death.
While lions often fight other lions,
battles to the death are rare.
So why are so many lions killing other lions?
Melody and Craig are totally mystified.
Desperate for any information they can get,
they turn to local safari guides
and park rangers.
Any time anybody saw any peculiar behavior
or a sick animal I would hear about it
and everybody was alert about this problem
of the lions.
Then, a chance encounter in the park
changes the course of the investigation.
A hot air balloon pilot taking tourists
on a bird’s eye safari, spots a male lion
basking in the morning sunshine.
As he looks on, the lion tries to stand up.
Something is very wrong.
He and his clients actually watch the lion
having a seizure right in front of them
and this does not happen.
We thought the lions somehow were invulnerable.
We thought, you know,
this is the most robust animal out here,
nothing can hurt it.
The lions here have been studied
for nearly thirty years.
No one had ever witnessed anything like this.
But reports of unusual behavior
start to flood in.
And what Melody sees is very disturbing.
Suddenly I’m seeing lions
with twitching faces, rhythmic twitching faces
and legs twitching and realized that
we had a very severe neurologic disease process
going on.
With the seizures being seen more often,
the team soon get news that provides
a crucial development and links them
to the mysterious spate
of lions killing each other.
The real breakthrough came one day
when a tour company was observing two male lions
out in the middle of the plains
looking perfectly normal, when a plane flew over
and apparently that little bit of stimulus
caused one of these lions to start
having a seizure right in front of them.
And in the midst of this
the other male lion, who was probably a brother,
started attacking that animal,
brutally biting him and that lion
that got bitten was never seen again
and so he probably died.
So, on hearing this report,
I suddenly went, that’s it.
That is how and why all these lions
were being killed by other lions,
that I’d been seeing for the previous months.
It was that they were having either seizures
or behavioral distortions
that their own pride members couldn’t tolerate
and they killed them.
Lions having seizures are being attacked
and killed by other lions.
But Melody and Craig have no idea
what is causing those seizures.
So they send blood and tissue samples
to labs across Africa, Europe and the US
for analysis.
And a lab in the United States
isolates the culprit- a virus
that no-one thought lions could contract.
There were a number of unique footprints
if you will, in the tissues,
something called a giant cell
where the nuclei divide but the cell can’t,
so you get these giant cells
with ten, twelve or more nuclei.
These giant cells with more than one nucleus
are a clear indication of a virus
called canine distemper.
In dogs, canine distemper can cause the brain
to swell and in extreme cases
leads to seizures.
It’s widespread in Africa’s domestic dogs,
but it’s never been seen before in wild cats.
Distemper is an airborne virus
so it’s a bit like a cold or the flu,
so if somebody sneezes on you,
that’s how you’re going to get it.
They’re highly infectious so on average
each infected animal will infect
three new animals.
So it’s that infectious, it’s out of control.
The virus is only transmitted
through close contact. And lions rarely,
if ever, come into contact with dogs,
so how could the big cats
have contracted a dog disease?
Now the problem is how do you get a disease
from a village of dogs to a lion
in the middle of the Serengeti?
Animals like jackals and bat-eared foxes
have been known to have the disease.
But one animal that travels freely
between villages and the savannah
is Africa’s very own garbage disposal unit
the hyena.
Hyenas are scavengers and what we see is that
in the villages, when the dogs are sick
and they die, the villagers
just throw their dogs out
to feed to the hyenas
and hyenas will commute long distances.
Hyenas will feed on a dead dog one day,
then fight over a kill with a lion the next,
passing on the virus.
Craig and Melody are stunned that
lions have contracted the disease.
And when they re-test samples
they’ve collected over the past three decades
the results are even more surprising.
The lions have had the disease before,
with no ill effects.
We could see clear signs
of an earlier outbreak in 1981
and there’d been hints of distemper outbreaks
in the 1960s and 70s, so it’s like,
well wait a minute, if distemper
is killing the lions, how come
it didn’t kill the lions in the 60s,
the 70s and the 80s?
there had to be something else going on.
So there must be another disease
infecting the lions that makes them vulnerable
to the effects of canine distemper.
Once again the lions have got canine distemper
and the team need to figure out
why they’re dying.
So we had a causative agent,
which is distemper, that clearly
coincided with these die-offs
and so after we had the second die-off
we went back and looked at what was going on
and then we realized there was just
this unique situation.
It turns out the circumstances
leading up to the outbreaks are identical.
Both epidemics occurred after long periods
without rain, causing the lions
to change their diet.
We had come through a really serious time
of drought that had gone on
for about a year and a half, maybe longer
and, as a consequence,
thousands and thousands of animals
were dying of starvation.
Not the carnivores but the prey species
and lions are opportunists
and so they became buffalo specialists
and every single night
they would go out and kill a buffalo.
My field assistants said they had never seen
so many being captured by the lions
and they literally were going
for one buffalo carcass
and then catching another sick buffalo.
When there’s this much food available,
lions don’t even bother to eat
the whole of their prey,
they just feast on their favorite parts
leaving the rest.
This is not normal. OK. Normally it’s,
you know, maybe once a week,
once every two weeks.
They would eat minor parts of the buffalo
and the part they liked the most was the liver
and if you’re a starving animal,
what does the liver have to do?
It has to detoxify everything in your body
and the liver becomes saturated
with whatever poisons that are in your body
and so one of the questions I had
is if that’s the part of the buffalo
that the lion was eating,
what did that do to that lion?
Could toxic buffalo livers be poisoning lions,
rendering them defenseless
against the canine distemper virus?
It’s very unlikely.
Lions benefit from an abundance of food.
And there have been many droughts in the past
when lions have feasted on buffalo
with no ill-effects.
But there is another way
the buffalo could be infecting the lions,
through their blood sucking ticks.
The other aspect of killing buffalo
every night is that the parasites
that infested the buffalo, the ticks,
then made an easy transfer on to the lions.
And buffalo carry a organism called a babesia.
Babesia is a microscopic parasite
that in high numbers causes anemia,
fever and weakness.
It’s transmitted from host to host
by ticks that feed on the blood of mammals,
including lions.
So could the babesia parasite
be the final piece of the puzzle?
Causing seizures and cannibalism
in the lions of the Serengeti?
Lets review the evidence.
First, hyenas contract Canine distemper
from domestic dogs.
When the dogs are sick and they die,
the villagers just throw their dogs out
to feed to the hyenas.
Hyenas come into close contact with lions
at kills in the wild
and the virus is passed on.
But canine distemper virus alone
doesn’t cause the seizures.
So could the lion’s diet of sick buffalo
have played a part?//They literally
were going from one buffalo carcass
and then catching another sick buffalo.
The other aspect of killing buffalo
every night is that the parasites
that infested the buffalo, the ticks,
then made an easy transfer on to the lions.
And buffalo carry a organism
called a babesia.// And when Melody
tests blood samples from dead lions
she discovers the final piece of the jigsaw.
They were loaded with a babesia-like organism.
It’s this microscopic parasite,
along with the canine distemper virus,
that causes the lions to have
these traumatic seizures.
And these fits lead to the deadly attacks
from other lions.//They were having seizures
that their own pride members
couldn’t tolerate and they killed them.
Having unraveled the complex mystery
of the killer lions of the Serengeti,
Melody and Craig are now able to predict
when future outbreaks might occur,
helping them better protect
Africa’s King of Beasts.
Case Closed.